Author: Tom Bartleby

Ozy FranzFN 1If you are not familiar with Ozy’s work, you should know that they blog at Thing of Things, which is definitely worth a read. Also, Ozy’s gender is non-binary and their prefered pronoun is “they.” If you want to debate the propriety of this, please feel free to do so here (though not at Ozy’s blog). But please also respect that request while you are here. recently had a post titled Why Is Harry Potter So Popular? In that post, Ozy argued that Harry Potter isn’t very good, but was popular only “because something had to be.”

The basic argument is that popularity can feed on itself and become self-reinforcing. Thus, Harry Potter may have caught on at first more or less by coincidence and then snowballed its way to global prominence. As people recommended it to each other and enjoyed discussing it with each other, the popularity became self-reinforcing.

The post cites a famous paper that exposed different groups of people to the same set of music—and discovered that different songs became popular in each group. If one song happened to get popular at first in a particular group, that caused people to recommend it to others; as it gained traction/rose to prominence, it would crowd out other similar songs that could have gotten popular instead. In a different group, some other song might get the initial burst of popularity. Then, that song would be the one that snowballed into dominance in that iteration of the experiment.

Ozy’s post argues that this is exactly what happened with Harry Potter: that it was one of several mediocre (“good-but-not-great”) children’s fantasy books published around the same time, and that any one of them could have randomly turned out to be the mega hit that Harry Potter would be. The post mentions The Animorphs, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Time QuintetFN 2The Time Quintet—aka the A Wrinkle in Time series—seems like an odd example here, since it was published starting in the 1960s. It doesn’t seem like it could have taken off in the late 90s the way Harry Potter did, even if the last book didn’t come out until 1989. And the media environment was so different in the 60s that the comparison doesn’t seem all that fair. The other two examples seem more relevant as other series that could have taken off instead of Harry Potter.

This argument struck me as pretty odd—not least because I know that the author is much more of a fan of Harry Potter than I am. I’m going to argue against this point on the object level: I think there were a bunch of reasons Harry Potter became more popular than other, similarly well-written novels published around the same time.

In the next post, I’ll move to the meta level, and talk about why this sort of debate matters for more than just Harry Potter. I think this argument about Harry Potter exposes a more fundamental challenge we face whenever we try to answer complex questions. But first, the object level—here’s why Ozy is wrong: Continue reading “Why Is Harry Potter Popular—A Rebuttal”

My blog-related to-do list on Friday consisted of the following tasks:

Figure out why the blog was loading slowly despite not using much media.

Set up backups for the blog.

The problem with this order, I discovered, was that if I totally crash my website in step one, I then have no backup to restore from. So, long story short, I managed to mess with the settings in my .htaccess file in an attempt to enhance browser caching but instead managed to totally take my blog offline. So, I was very much regretting not having reversed the order of those two priorities. Continue reading “Blog Outage Resolved—Visual Feedback Request”

Content warning: This post contains multiple links to TV Tropes, (including that one!). TV Tropes is a known time-suck and rabid destroyer of productivity. Click at your own peril—you have been warned.

This post is going to 1) explain what in the world that means; 2) provide some examples of particularly awful But Thou Musts; and 3) provide my analysis of why Nonstandard Game Overs are a better—and underused—solution.

First: defining our terms. But Thou Must is when a game presents the player-character with a choice, but doesn’t give the player a real choice at all. The most egregious form of this is when your character is asked a question that seems like you could answer it either way but you (the player) are only given one answer. Example:

KING: Will you venture through the Swamp of Unpleasant Odors, fight the Ogre of Unreasonable Difficulty, and retrieve the Plot Coupon I desire?

PLAYER’S RESPONSES (pick one): 1) Gladly! 2) If you ask it of me sire, then yes. 3) That sound awful, necessary; I agree. 4) So long as you pay up on the reward we discussed, I’ll do it.

I wasn’t planning to write any more about Skyrim, but talking about Skyrim’s thieves guild questline reminded me of one of my more absurdist Skyrim experiences, and I feel the need to share. I don’t have anything analytical to say about this, so I’m not counting it as one of my normal weekly posts. At the same time, it’s a funny story. If you haven’t played Skyrim, I feel sorry for you I don’t know how much this will mean to you; feel free to skip this one if you want.

So, let’s set the stage, and then I’ll tell the grand story of how—against all odds—I infiltrated the Brinewater Grotto, in perhaps the most ridiculous way possible.

In one of my first playthroughs, I decided to play a sneaky character on hard, with the goal of avoiding as much combat as I could. I was good at sneaking, picking pockets, talking my way out of trouble, picking locks, and basically nothing that involved a stand-up fight. Continue reading “Bonus Post: He’ll Give You The Shirt Off His Back”

Back in Part 1 of this series, I promised that I’d talk about what the Skyrim Thieves Guild questline can teach us about game design and how to enjoy games. Since then, we’ve talked about the questline’s plot, tone, and ending—and I’ve explained how I look at each one in a way that makes me like the questline a lot more than many people do. Now let’s dive into the big-picture issue: I think we can learn two important lessons. First:

Triple A games are terrified of giving the players a break

Game developers keep writing games where everything is always turned up to eleven at all times: full intensity, full epicness, full throttle from opening cinematic through closing credits. This is a really bad idea. When everything is epic, nothing is. Call it “intensity fatigue” or “the importance of quiet moments“; whatever you call it, it’s clear that games are weaker and less impactful when they keep trying to make every moment one of the best in the game. This is not a unique insight; it’s storytelling 101. So why do developers keep messing this up?

After talking about plot and tone, we’re ready to tackle the ending of the thieves guild quests. In brief, the ending is that you get inducted into the secret-society-within-a-secret-society called the Nightingales, go after the treacherous former guild master who stole the “skeleton key” that the Nightingales are sworn to protect, kill him, recover the key, and return it to the patron god of the Nightingales, Nocturnal (which requires sneaking through another long, trap-filled dungeon). Having done all that, you return to the thieves guild and—assuming you’ve completed the more thievery-focused quests the way I’m convinced was intended—are immediately made guild master.FN 1If you haven’t done any of those quests, people thank you for saving the day and talk about how great it is to have you in charge, and then send you out to pick pockets or steal candlesticks. I imagine that as a pretty awkward conversation.

The controversial part of all this is the “become a Nightingale” part. When you get inducted, you strike a deal with Nocturnal, and this deal is subject to significant interpretation depending on the player’s perspective and the choices their character has made. Basically, this deal can range from totally awful, you’d-have-to-be-an-idiot-to-accept-it all the way to wonderful bargain; depending on your perspective, it can be a deal where you literally sell your soul for nothing, or one where you get fantastic advantages at no cost at all. Or, if you’re very boring, it can be something where you give up nothing and get basically nothing. Let’s dive in. Continue reading “Defending the Indefensible: Skyrim’s Thieves Guild — Part 4”

Last time, we talked about the plot holes in the thieves guild questline, and how they all can be traced back to the regrettable decision, late in production, to avoid having NPCs tell the player to come back in a few days. This time, we’re turning to the thematic issues.

Maybe that should be thematic issue, singular. It’s really just one problem, but it’s a whopper: the thieves guild quests don’t involve much thieving.

As Shamus puts it describing the final quest (the one returning the skeleton key):

I get it. This last quest is supposed to be ironic, because we’re returning something instead of stealing it. Except, it fails at this because none of my other quests ever had anything to do with stealing valuable items. I extorted money with vandalism and threats of violence as part of my initiation. I stole a document (and committed arson) at Goldenglow Estates. I perpetrated fraud and food poisoning at Honningbrew Meadery. I attempted the murder of Karliah. I made a copy of some intellectual property by making the rubbing of the translation guide. You might think that the Eyes of the Falmer count, but that wasn’t a heist. Those were in a ruin. If that’s theft, then Indiana Jones is the biggest cat burglar in history. Theft was never, ever a theme of these quests, so one more quest of non-theft isn’t ironic at all. It’s just more non-Thief crap for me to do. You had idiot berzerker companions with you for the two set-piece dungeons, so the missions barely involved sneaking.

Last time, we talked about how Skyrim was probably originally written with quests that used the same system as Morrowind: people would, when the plot called for it, tell you to come back in a day (or whenever) and would refuse to continue to plotline until you’d the required amount of time had passed.

I really liked this system in Morrowind. It gave the players the choice: if they were roleplaying diligently, they could go off and find something else to occupy themselves until the next day. Or, if they were into the questline and wanted to continue, they could end the conversation, press the wait button the right number of times, and jump right to the next chunk of content. Sure, this wasn’t as “realistic”—within the rules of the game, you were technically standing stock still for 24 hours, just waiting for whatever to happen. But it seemed to work fine, taking the place of a chapter break in a novel, or a DM narration in a tabletop game, where the narration just skips ahead. (“The next night, you return to the Sunken Flagon, and the guild has finished examining the journal.”)

Why are we talking about a game that came out over five years ago? Well, in part it’s still pretty popular: as of this writing, it’s one of the top-twenty most played games on Steam, and is regularly played by tens of thousands of people every day. And in part, it’s because I’ve wanted to say this for a few years now and, darnit, now that I have a blog I’m going to have my say. But mostly, it’s because, now that emotions have cooled a bit, I think an analysis of what worked and where some of the flaws—or perceived flaws—came from can teach us a bit about game design. And maybe even a bit about how we enjoy games.

The Thieves GuildFN 1Every time I write that, I want it to be “Thieves’ Guild.” Isn’t it the guild belonging to the thieves? I know, I know, it’s the guild comprised of the thieves, but that will never stop looking wrong to me. questline in Skyrim is a famous trainwreck. Shamus Young wrote a detailedfive-partseries of posts detailing how the questline fails to present a coherent plot, fails thematically, and fails to have a satisfying ending. I think all that is true . . . from a certain point of view.

And yet it’s still one of my all-time favorites. This post is an attempt to explain why.

My basic theory is that most of the biggest problems with the plotting of the questline come down to a single problem caused by executive meddling. If you’re able to set that aside, the whole questline makes a lot more sense. And, that same executive caused some of the thematic difficulties. That ending, in turn, depends entirely on out-of-game perspective. But I’m getting ahead of myself—let’s start with the plot. Continue reading “Defending the Indefensible: Skyrim’s Thieves Guild — Part 1”

So, if you’ve been reading my seriesofpostsso far, I hope that I’ve convinced you that science does sometimes ignore good ideas. This post is going to answer a simple question: so what? If this problem is true, what should we do about it?

My answer: we should ignore science’s positive pronouncements—only pay attention to what science says is wrong, not what it says is right.

But before explaining why I think that, I’ve realized a big problem. The ignoring-good-ideas-when-they-are-not-made-loudly issue needs a better name, and not only because I’m tired of typing all that out. More importantly, when we give a concept a short, manageable name, we “crystalize the pattern.” An idea becomes a lot easier to talk about when it has a usable name (that doesn’t have eight hyphens). So, I’m officially calling this problem science has of ignoring good ideas that aren’t made loudly the “haystack problem.” Science may be right about what ideas are awful when it holds them up for scrutiny, but it sucks at finding the needle-in-a-haystack good ideas in the first place.

So, why should weFN 1When I say “we,” I mean that literally: you and me. There’s an interesting question about how “society” should solve the haystack problem, or about what a Science Czar should change to make the haystack problem go away. But I’m not the Science Czar, and I’m guessing most of you aren’t either. I’m more interested on how knowledge of the haystack problem should change our own, individual-level beliefs and actions. react to science’s haystack problem by only paying attention to the scientific establishment when it says something is wrong?